Teachers love creativity in their students and rarely, by US standards, will you see teachers discouraging students fiddling with machines and equipment on their own. But all students are not lucky.
Especially not when the student is a 14-year-old Muslim kid of Sudanese-origin living in US.
Police in Texas, US, arrested the 14-year-old Ahmed for bringing to school a clock that he built himself in order to impress his teachers. The student Ahmed Mohamed, a resident of Irving who loves robotics and engineering, was quizzed by police officers, handcuffed and taken in juvenile detention after his teachers called police about his creation that “looked like a bomb.”
The incident has raised allegations of racism and made MacArthur High Texas school district the target of online outrage, The Independent reports.
His clock now sits in an evidence room. Police say they may yet charge him with making a hoax bomb — though they acknowledge he told everyone who would listen that it’s a clock, The Dallas Morning News reported.
While Ahmed’s father, Mohamed Elhassan Mohamed, who migrated to the US from Sudan is upset, the Council on American-Islamic Relations is once again eyeing claims of Islamophobia in Irving.
I expect they will have more to say tomorrow, but Ahmed’s sister asked me to share this photo. A NASA shirt! pic.twitter.com/nR4gt992gB
— Anil Dash (@anildash) September 16, 2015 The Independent reported the Irving, Texas, ninth grader has a talent for tinkering — he constructs his own radios and once built a bluetooth speaker as a gift for his friend — and he wanted to show his new teachers what he could do.
Ahmed never claimed his device was anything but a clock, said police spokesman James McLellan. And police have no reason to think it was dangerous. But officers still didn’t believe Ahmed was giving them the whole story, the DM report said.
“We have no information that he claimed it was a bomb,” McLellan said. “He kept maintaining it was a clock, but there was no broader explanation.”
Asked what broader explanation the boy could have given, the spokesman explained:
“It could reasonably be mistaken as a device if left in a bathroom or under a car. The concern was, what was this thing built for? Do we take him into custody?”
Well, we leave it to your imagination what if the same clock had been made by a non-Muslim 14-year-old school kid. One thing we are sure about is: he or she wouldn’t have landed in juvenile detention.
